Faculty News

Research Scholar Robert Frank discusses his new book, "Success and Luck"

— May 12, 2016

Excerpt from New York Magazine -- "Humans don’t, as a general rule, do well with ambiguity. We like to tell clear, coherent stories about the world we see in front of us, and success is no exception. Hindsight bias, which is — and I’m just going to go with the Wikipedia definition here, because it’s good — 'the inclination, after an event has occurred, to see the event as having been predictable, despite there having been little or no objective basis for predicting it,' can partly explain how we come up with stories that cause us to discount the role of luck. Frank provided two examples of how hindsight bias warps our understanding of success in this manner: the Mona Lisa and Bryan Cranston."